The Book I HAD to Write

Last year, I came across an essay called “Book Publishing is Broken” by today’s podcast guest, Kathleen Schmidt .

Using her decades of experience in book PR & strategy, Kathleen laid out several reasons why traditional publishing fails writers. (If you haven’t already read that post, you’ll get to hear Kathleen’s reasons in our interview).

And the essay really stood out...not just because Kathleen presented solutions to the problems she diagnosed...but also because her perspective was clear-sighted, well-informed, but also so honest, direct, and personal.

I’ve been hooked on Publishing Confidential , Kathleen’s Substack newsletter, ever since. With over 5,000 subscribers, I think of it as one of the must-reads for any writer looking to understand today’s publishing landscape.

In our interview, we talk about that landscape, about the utility of hiring an independent publicist, and the value of creating work that reaches beyond traditional media outlets.

We also discuss why memoirs are one of the hardest categories for agents to sell right now, and what authors can consider to make their books more marketable.

Kathleen Schmidt is the Founder and President of Kathleen Schmidt Public Relations, a boutique firm specializing in branding, PR, marketing, consulting, and business strategy for authors, publishers, and booksellers. She also writes and publishes the Publishing Confidential newsletter.

Warning: this episode includes a brief mention of suicidal ideation. If you or someone you love is struggling with a mental health crisis, you can contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255). (In Spanish, dial 1-888-628-9454).

Some of my biggest takeaways:

Publishing too many books and lack of marketing support are primary reasons why the industry struggles.

Publishers produce more books than the market can sustain, often neglecting to back many with substantial marketing efforts. "They publish far too many books," Schmidt states unequivocally. It's a perplexing situation that challenges authors and industry insiders alike. The ramifications of this are profound—not just for the discoverability and success of individual titles but for the long-term sustainability of publishing entities themselves.

Schmidt expresses her consternation over the lack of direction regarding advances and acquisitions: "It's all kind of garbled and I feel like if you're not able to pay authors an amount that they can live on, what are we doing?" These pivotal industry dynamics are not just numbers on a spreadsheet but represent the livelihoods of creatives whose stories shape our culture.

Authors need to participate actively in the marketing and publicity of their books, using strategies tailored to their specific audience.

In the digital age, a robust social media presence is often considered non-negotiable. But where should authors concentrate their efforts? Schmidt advocates for targeted strategies—"find where your audience lives when they're not reading books"—and identifies threads and Instagram as effective platforms. However, she aptly recognizes that "every author should do" does not mean straitjacketing all writers into a one-size-fits-all approach. Instead, authors need to be authentic, engage with their readers, and leverage digital surrogates when necessary to carry their message.

Schmidt's distinction between pitch-focused publicity versus sales-driven strategies underscores the complexity of book marketing in the current landscape. "I am the publicist who thinks about how are we going to sell the book?" she poses, aligning author success with commercial viability and practical application.

Memoir faces challenges due to market oversaturation and authors should consider additional angles to be sellable.

The realm of memoir publishing is undergoing profound change, leaving many authors pondering the fate of their personal stories. With the market oversaturated by similar stories, distinguishing a memoir requires more than just a riveting life story—it requires a unique angle or an additional layer of value such as the 'Memoir Plus' concept.

Schmidt pushes authors to grapple with the real question: "is it a book or is it an essay?" This discernment is crucial in a world where the distinction between public sharing and a publishable memoir is increasingly blurred by the constancy of social media narratives. The trend now demands memoirists to consider if their life narratives are enough to stand alone as books or if they are better shared in smaller, perhaps digital, formats.

"Know who your audience is. Be very specific about that ...

Last fall, administrators at Gettysburg College announced the shuttering of the prestigious Gettysburg Review. This just seemed like the latest in a long string of magazines and journals that have closed the past few years.

Curious about what’s going on, I called Travis Kurowski, a leading expert on literary magazines, to help me understand what was happening. Today’s podcast features the interview we recorded in the immediate aftermath of the news last October.

But, Kurowski, who has also appeared on CNN.com and elsewhere, was able to shed light on broader themes and trends. We discuss why an entire ecosphere of literary journals—supported for nearly 100 years by institutions of higher ed—may also be in deep trouble.

And we explore the ways in which recent tech has changed reading habits, and why that will continue to doom some journals, even as others are adapting themselves to stay relevant to 21st century literary culture.

This conversation is well worth listening to for anyone who wants to publish in—or is concerned about the well-being and future of—literary magazines and journals.

Some of my biggest takeaways from this interview

Outside prestige isn’t enough to save storied journals like The Gettysburg Review.

While many writers took to social media to point out that most of the world wouldn’t know about Gettysburg College if it wasn’t for the Review, that argument didn’t seem to matter much to administrators.

The problem was, rather, one of economics...and the readiness with which both college administrators and corporate interests are willing to cut arts funding.

As with pretty much every business in the world, the pandemic gutted operating revenues at Gettysburg; it has been running significant deficits recently—a $6.7 million deficit in 2021 alone.

When the college was looking for expense lines to cut, they focused on those (like the Review) which, they claimed, didn’tdirectly enhance student life.

That last argument is a highly dubious one, by the way. Plenty of students learned a ton about literary publishing thanks to helping to produce the Review over the years. But this is the story that the administrators told themselves and the rest of us.

The sustainability of literary journals—especially those connected with colleges and universities—feels more fragile than ever.

Literary journals have been associated with higher ed for almost a century. Often these journals were seen as prestige projects, aimed at enhancing the institutions beyond its walls—even as these journals were often subject to the vagaries of institutional budgets, priorities, and department allegiances.

"Literary journals have been on higher education campuses for...almost 100 years now...and sometimes they get cut from the budgets," Kurowski says.

The difference today? Higher ed is facing greater economic pressures than ever before. Bloated administrations and a major decrease in enrollments—what Kurowski calls “the cliff of 18-year-olds”—are shrinking budgets.

And with college and university budgets facing bleak prospects for the foreseeable future, the days of university-funded literary journals and similar prestige projects may be behind us.

Many literary journals haven’t adapted to the digital “literary economy”...and they’re getting left behind.

It won’t be news that the way we consume media has radically changed even in the span of a decade or two.

With the advent of the internet and mobile technology, readers have migrated, en masse, to the digital landscape.

And that has major implications for old-school print literary journals:

“You walk down any hallway, anywhere in your house, right? And we're just staring at their phones. We’re reading differently, we’re writing differently, we’re talking differently online. But our literary journals kind of look the same as they did 50 or 70 years ago,” Kurowski says.

By way of example, Kurowski points out that when he went to look at the Gettsyburg Review website to prep for our interview, he wasn’t able to click on any of the poems or short stories.

So it’s really necessary for journals to reassess how readers today (and beyond) are accessing their content.

Readers are no longer reading cover-to-cover...and journals need to embrace that change.

The problem goes beyond clickable websites. The very way we consume print magazines has profoundly shifted—something that publishing expertJane Friedmanhas...

For this final post of 2023, here’s one from the archives — perhaps the most popular episode of The Book I Had to Write podcast.

In this segment, I talk with Sari Botton, the author of the memoir/essay collection ...And You May Find Yourself, and the founder of Oldster magazine.

Back around 2010, Sari started an interview series at The Rumpus called “Conversations with Writers Braver Than Me.”

By definition, memoir and essays inevitably include stories about the people in our lives. But figuring out what the lines are – who we feel we can write about and how to do it – that takes time. And lots of real-world practice.

However, when she herself was first working on memoir, Sari says she felt paralyzed by the fear of hurting those closest to her.

Over the course of a dozen years, Sari grappled extensively with how to give herself permission to write about herself and others. As her 2022 memoir-in-essays, And You May Find Yourself..., started coming together during the pandemic, she landed on a different way to understand this issue.

Writing about herself is really an act of defiance, she says. Women, and particularly women writing memoir, are often derided for first-person writing.

Or, as she writes in the foreword to her book: “I remembered that my voice matters. I’m using it now, to take up space, to say, ‘I was here.’”

In this interview, we also talk about Gen X identity, and about Oldster magazine, which was then a newer project for Sari, and is now an extremely-popular Substack aimed at exploring of how we live inside our aging bodies.

Sari Botton is also the editor of two anthologies, the award-winning GOODBYE TO ALL THAT: WRITERS ON LOVING & LEAVING NY, as well as the NYT bestselling followup NEVER SAY GOODBYE: WRITERS ON THEIR UNSHAKEABLE LOVE FOR NY.

In case you’re curious, here are some related from this episode

And You May Find Yourself... available from Bookshop | IndieBound | Barnes & Noble | Amazon

After Fifteen Years, I Stopped Panicking, Started Declawing, and Finally Published My Memoir, by Sari Botton (Catapult)

Conversations with Writers Braver than Me by Sari Botton (The Rumpus)

Oldster Magazine

Working on a memoir? Here are some additional resources for how to handle writing about others

A Big Shitty Party: Six Parables of Writing about Other People, by Melissa Febos

Other People’s Secrets: An Interview with Kerry Cohen by Paul Zakrzewski, (Brevity Magazine)

The Truth of Memoir: How to Write about Yourself and Others with Honesty, Emotion, and Integrity, by Kerry Cohen Bookshop | Amazon

“Other People’s Secrets” (essay) by Patricia Hampl, collected in I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory

Credits

This episode was edited by Paul Zakrzewski and produced by Magpie Audio Productions. Theme music is "The Stone Mansion" by BlueDot Productions

It can be difficult for writers to learn to put our stories front and center. That was originally the case with today’s guest, Lilly Dancyger. She originally set out to memorialize her father, Joe Schactman, through a book that would feature artwork and stories she’d collected from friends.

In this converation with memoirist Abigail Thomas, we discuss the backstory of writing Safekeeping, and that now-classic memoir was initially turned down by all the editors the book was sent, except for one.

We talk about how crafting a memoir-in-fragments like Safekeeping allows a writer to depict memories in a way a more conventional structure doesn’t permit. She talks about why writing what you don’t remember is as important as what you do; and the value of following what interests and obsesses you, even if it doesn't seem to go anywhere at first.

Thomas’s is one of the great voices in memoir—shrewd, warm, devoid of self-pity—and like all wise teachers, she imparts insights about a life well spent, even when talking about a book well-crafted.

This conversation was recorded in 2022 and just updated.

Abigail Thomas is the author of several memoirs, including Safekeeping, A Three Dog Life, What Comes Next and How to Like it, and most recently Still Life at Eighty, as well as three works of fiction: Getting Over Tom, An Actual Life, and Herb’s Pajamas.

Some of my biggest takeaways

“Chronological order makes little sense to me...”

Most of Thomas’s memoirs eschew the conventional chronological approach, opting instead for fragmented structures that mirror the way memory works. Abigail Thomas believes that "life has been lived like a series of moments," and memoirs are stronger when they reflect that.

"Well, I will confess that I have a poor memory, except for the things I remember. So putting them in chronological order makes very little sense to me. It's why this now? Why am I thinking of this now? Why this memory? Write it down. You'll find out why. The trick is not to boss them around, you know. Just let them come, and they will."

This memoir-in-fragments approach unexpectedly draws the reader in

Safekeeping, for example, is comprised of dozens of short sections—some four or five pages, others as brief as a single sentence. Then there’s the narrator herself, frequently switching between past and present tense, or between first- and third-person.

With all that lack of connective tissue, all that shifting of tenses and point-of-view, you’d expect the narrative flow to be constantly disrupted. Instead this approach creates a genuine connection with readers, in part because it invites them to piece together the narrative puzzle

The key to writing a great memoir-in-fragments is to have a strong, unified voice

Married for the first time at 18, remarried at 27—Abigail Thomas’s life was full of wrong turns. She had a lot of living under her belt. Yet the narrator here keeps things light and crisp, avoiding self-judgment. Instead, here the persona is vulnerable, startlingly honest, unsentimental, wry, and above all, entertaining.

In The Situation and the Story, Vivian Gornick writes that great memoirs feature a “truth-telling” narrator. We trust the voices of George Orwell, Annie Dillard, or James Baldwin because they seem so honest and self-aware. Thomas’s narrator is one of these.

"The more vulnerable you make yourself, the stronger you become”

Thomas urges writers to be honest and vulnerable, since revealing truths about oneself tends to have a liberating effect. This openness serves as a conduit through which readers can see their truths reflected in the author’s life, reinforcing the fact we all tend to feel similar things inside.

The key is to write without an agenda—to connect with an emotion and let go of outcomes.

“You need to write about the stuff you don't wanna write about...[but] you have to find a side door, and it isn't therapy. Writing isn't therapy. But if you're truthful, and honest, and write what you need to write, it has the effect of you've made something out of it separate from yourself, you've revealed things to yourself about yourself, and it's a way of forgiving yourself, you know, and others.”

“The past is every bit as unpredictable as the future”

The unpredictable nature of memory can be troubling for both writer and reader. Yet, Thomas says that this unpredictability is where the real magic of memoir writing lies. The unpredictable becomes an asset, turning writing into a journey of self-discovery and an act of creative courage.

“I don't believe in chronology. And the older you get, the more you don't believe in chronology or even time. What is it? I mean, I'm at the age now where I live entirely in the moment. Sometimes the moment is a good one, sometimes it's a more interesting one, but that's where I am. I never think about the future. I do have memories, and I write about them because I wrote somewhere, ‘You dis...